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April 2017
Policy&Practice
3
president‘s
memo
By Tracy Wareing Evans
C
hances are if you’ve read this
column or heard me speak in the
past couple of years, you’ve seen or
heard the words “framing matters” and
you know that I am a self-proclaimed
“geek” of framing science and believe
it is a key tool for anyone interested
in moving system transformation in
health and human services. In recent
months, I have doubled-down on that
belief, especially as we witness drasti-
cally different narratives playing out
across our nation.
In prior issues of
Policy & Practice,
we have introduced you to framing and
what effective framing can do to make
our shared narrative more productive
and impactful. We have also introduced
you to experts, especially our friends
at the Frameworks Institute, and the
results of their research relevant to our
field
(see
www.frameworksinstitute.org)
.
At APHSA, we continue to be both eager
students and practicing champions of
framing. We are increasingly mindful
of the pitfalls we all can fall into when
describing why human services matters
and what can be done to improve
outcomes for children, families, and
communities. In this column, I share two
framing strategies that can help us avoid
the most commonmistakes and produce
more effective frames.
First, we need to
widen our lens.
Think about what happens when you
add a wide-angle lens to your camera
and turn to its widest position—what
do you see? You capture as much of
the landscape before you as possible
within the frame.
In the human services space, when
we widen our lens, it helps us avoid the
fundamental attribution error—i.e., the
predominant belief that we can “fix” an
individual or family through a program
or service without addressing the envi-
ronmental factors in their lives. In our
field, too often we tell an individual
success story to policymakers or the
public believing that it perfectly illus-
trates why a program or service works.
Consider, for example, the story of
a young mother who recounts the
impact on her life when she is able to
get a job with a meaningful wage. If
the story focuses on her journey, it will
likely be overwhelmed by the deeply
embedded American value of hard
work and grit. In other words, listeners
will attribute her success to her resil-
ience and fortitude alone, not also to
the services around her. Too often, the
story we believe we are telling simply
isn’t heard. What is heard is the story of
someone who overcame the odds (what
Frameworks refers to as the value of
“self-making”), rather than how the
human-serving systems supported and
empowered their journey.
We have to get better at showing the
full landscape. This means when we
Why Framing Matters:
Ways to Move Forward
See President’s Memo on page 30
Photo illustration by Chris Campbell